''A lot of my friends think Tony Abbott is appalling,'' says Lesley Podesta. She can understand why. She was one of his opponents on the Student Representative Council of Sydney University and saw him up close, when he was playing aggressive politics against the left.

But the surprise for Podesta was what she learnt about Abbott when they next crossed paths. She rose to become a senior official in the federal Department of Health when Abbott was minister. Podesta found herself working with him.

Tony Abbott is a 'polarising right-winger' ... former US Ambassador to Australia Robert McCallum.

''A lot of people think he's hairy-chested and makes an immediate decision, but he wasn't like that,'' says Podesta, who now works with the Fred Hollows Foundation for preventing blindness. ''He does have his immediate political and ideological centre but so does every minister. He is open to evidence. He was a thoughtful minister. He would have quite an intense process of investigating and then going with the evidence. I found him genuinely open and committed to positive reform.''

Such as?

''When Mal Brough was beating his chest and being macho about the Northern Territory intervention into Aboriginal communities, Abbott was health minister. He was open to supporting innovative, long-term work helping new mothers form better attachment to their children.''

It was new policy, it promised no short-run returns and it was out of line with the stern political mood of quasi-military emergency. But Abbott committed to it regardless, a new program called the Nurse Family Partnership, which is operating in three communities today, says Podesta, who was a senior official at the Office for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health, among other appointments.

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''All the work that's been done shows that it's remarkably effective in everything from cutting levels of child abuse to improving school retention rates, but it's a 10-year to 15-year initiative.''

So while many of her friends are appalled at what they know of Tony Abbott, Podesta is genuinely appreciative of her time working with him. ''He was very polite, very considerate, he's very sensible about taking advice, he had a really good relationship with the Health Department and he was a very easy minister to work with … and I've worked with a lot of ministers,'' says Podesta, who was also a board member of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, among other things.

So who is the real Tony Abbott? A former US ambassador to Australia, Robert McCallum, described him to Washington as ''a polarising right-winger'' with a ''propensity for insensitivity and controversy'', according to a cable published by WikiLeaks.

The shorthand for this might be the description that Labor MP Rob Mitchell gave Abbott: ''Neanderthal.''

This is the Tony Abbott who spent the past two years demonising Julia Gillard, calling for a ''people's revolt'' against the carbon tax, cheering on nutters and fringe-dwellers who turned out in response, associating himself with a crowd of angry malcontents carrying abusive and sexist placards. It's the Abbott whom Gillard called a sexist. This is Tony the tribal leader, Tony of the Tea Party.

Or is he the responsible, thoughtful, decent minister who listens to advice and functions effectively as part of a stable, successful government, the Abbott that Lesley Podesta encountered? This is Tony the national leader, Tony the John Howard protege.

A widely admired Brisbane ophthalmologist, Bill Glasson, was the national president of the doctors' lobby group, the Australian Medical Association, when the medical indemnity crisis struck in 2003. The cost of doctors' insurance soared so high that many refused to continue to practise.

''I addressed 5000 doctors at Randwick Racecourse,'' Glasson recalls. ''The profession had just had enough. I said that unless something was done, we'd pull out every doctor in Australia.''

John Howard rang Glasson that night and told him he was replacing his minister for health, Kay Patterson, with Tony Abbott. Glasson's reaction: ''I thought, 'Shit, this is going to be tough. How will I handle this fella?' ''

Glasson met Abbott in the new health minister's Parliament House office and presented him with five demands. ''I told him, 'If these aren't met, we will pull the whole profession out.' ''

The minister left the room, conferred with Howard, then returned to tell Glasson that he could meet three of the five. ''I leant across the table and I gently grabbed him by the shirt,'' Glasson recalls. ''I said to him, 'I grew up in the country and I think I can look an animal in the eye and know whether to trust it. I look you in the eye and I think I can trust you.' I went back to the doctors and I said, 'We've got three of our demands up, but I trust him to deliver the rest.'

''Abbott personally got into that medical indemnity package. He worked on it day in and day out. He did meet the other two demands. The people of Australia don't understand. If they didn't have him in that job, we would have pulled out all the doctors. He's a very focused fella. He doesn't piss around. He gets the job done.''

Glasson is now challenging Kevin Rudd as the Liberal-National Party candidate for the Brisbane seat of Griffith at this year's election. But he also holds the Order of Australia and commands such respect for his work that Labor is loath to attack him. He's no Liberal hack.

Once again, who is the real Tony Abbott? The man that Labor's Anthony Albanese describes as ''all opposition and no leader'', the caricature politician so negative that he has the letters ''NO'' shaved into his chest hair, as depicted by The Australian Financial Review's cartoonist, David Rowe?

Is he negative to the point of destruction?

Or is he the sane, calm and reliable crisis manager who walks into the middle of a grave potential crisis, negotiates a solution to a complex problem, and wins respect all round, the Abbott whom Glasson discovered?

A senior official of the federal Employment Department, who has since retired, recalls one Christmas break when his then minister, Tony Abbott, was on holiday with his family on the coast.

Some pressing matter arose and the official needed to find Abbott urgently. He drove to the coast and recalls his ''shock'' at walking in on his minister's holiday destination. ''He was staying in a caravan park, with his family, having a great time, mixing with people who enjoy that sort of life,'' says the retired official, who does not want to be named for fear of being drawn into the political fray after a career spent avoiding it.

''The point is, he was not staying in some flash hotel or fancy resort. I worked in government for 40 years. I've worked closely with a lot of ministers and senior politicians. There are very few as humble and ordinary outside their working lives.''

Not only that, he found Abbott to be an impressive minister who carried a real concern for the human consequences of policy. As employment minister, Abbott dismantled the old Commonwealth Employment Service, put its functions out to tender and created the Jobs Network. ''Once the decision was taken, Abbott turned his attention to the 10,000 people who worked in the CES. He said, 'We can't just junk them and move on.' So the tenderers for the slices of the business were encouraged to recruit these people. He looked closely at their redundancy terms.

''He agreed to establish a government-owned but privately managed agency to participate in tender to give those who wanted to stay in the public sector a chance to show they could compete.''

Again, who is the real Tony Abbott? The heartless thug whom the journalist Annabel Crabb nicknamed People Skills after his dreadful swipe at the champion of asbestos sufferers, Bernie Banton? The erratic boofhead of whom Anthony Albanese likes to say: ''In your guts you know he's nuts.''

Or is he the careful reformer who can successfully manage a major transformation and take care to protect the lives of the people who may be bruised by the change?

He threw the switch in December, saying he wanted to be no longer Dr No, but Dr Yes. The election, he told the National Press Club a few weeks ago, ''should be about choosing a prime minister who understands that the job is to be a national leader rather than just a tribal chief'', and boasted of his seven years as a cabinet minister.

He delivered his Real Solutions policy paper, and with the invaluable aid of a great deal of publicity, he is already seeing some results. The Nielsen poll, published this week, showed Abbott overtaking Gillard as preferred prime minister and outperforming her on job approval as well.

''I think the results probably reflect Abbott's change of approach'', becoming less aggressive and more positive, said the Herald's pollster, John Stirton. ''There have been far fewer shots of him on the evening news in his shrill, hectoring mode. He's been more moderate and bipartisan - it took him a long time to learn, but the voters rather like that.''

Is the switch too drastic to be plausible? The Liberal Party is planning a campaign theme that draws a common thread through both sides of the Abbott schizophrenia.

The theme? Competence. The argument runs that Abbott was effective as an opposition leader holding the government to account, and is also a competent alternative prime minister. He's a competent leader in both modes, runs the Liberals' argument.

Competence is the Liberals' chosen election theme not only because it reconciles the irreconcilable - Minister Abbott and Tea Party Tony - but because it is a stark contrast with the popular impression of Labor. And, the Liberals reason, because it can withstand any sudden Labor leadership switch from Gillard to Kevin Rudd.